Bruner Blog

Aside from the obvious tradegy of the loss of innocent life in this war, the news of the looting and ransacking of Baghdad’s National Museum of Antiquities, along with hospitals, is perhaps the most dispiriting turn of this whole sorry affair.

For weeks before the bombing started, pundits were correctly saying that the hardest part would not be winning the war but winning the peace. For Rumsfeld et al to now claim that, on the one hand, their battle plan was not too light on troops for a military victory (as was the media’s obsession two weeks ago, when supply lines seemed too thinly distributed in the face of guerrilla attacks), yet then, on the other hand, claim that they don’t have enough troops to spare for providing humanitarian relief or maintaining civic order is clearly an admission of failure for what is really the most critical mission of the whole war: peace and democracy. One lesson U.S. military historians should certainly draw from this campaign is that in the future our modern army must do at least as efficient of a job embedding the means for immediate humanitarian relief and civic policing directly into their military forces as they have done with the Reality PR team of the embedded world press corp. To simply shrug and complain, “Hey, that’s not what the military is trained to do; it’s not our job” is beyond a cop-out. It’s truly bordering on criminal negligence.

The loss of innocent life in this war is clearly its gravest toll, but we all knew that was inevitable when it began, despite which I publicly stated my support for the war before it started. And to the coalition’s credit, they do appear to have done a remarkable job keeping the number of civilian casualties to historic lows, as wars go (aside from all outward appearances that they targeted some journalists along the way). That they allowed the looting of hospitals is grotesque, and doubtless it will add to the deaths of non-combatants. In the end, however, the hospitals can be re-supplied, presumably in short order, so the consequences of that disgrace may not be so long remembered.

But the National Museum of Antiquities… The pain of that neglect on the part of the American troops may well be remembered in history on par with the burning of the Library of Alexandria. One might try to argue these were “just things,” and that people should not get so worked up about it. But it was 5,000 years of human history, something that never can be replaced. And defending it would have been so simple. A few soldiers on guard. The army couldn’t spare five men? Or cynically, did they just not care? “Let the Iraqis show themselves for the barbarians they are” or something like that? I fear in the end we may lose a kingdom for want of a nail.

I can’t help thinking of Harry Hill Bandholtz, a U.S. general of minor hero status in Hungary, who, in 1919, saved the Hungarian National Museum from looters with a simple mail-censor stamp. He is remembered today with a statue that stands in front of the U.S. embassy in Budapest (pictured here).

The site Kantor’s Budapest tells the story, excerpted here:

Upon the general collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in 1918, and 133 days of power of Bela Kun’s communist regime in 1919, foreign armies advanced into the territory of the defeated Kingdom of Hungary, and this culminated in the occupation of Budapest by the Romanian army.

Budapest then become the temporary home of many foreign military officers who were sent here to supervise the foreign occupation. Alongside with his three co-commanders from Italy, France and Great Britain, General Bandholtz of the United States Army arrived in Budapest on August 11, 1919.

In his job of supervising the Romanian occupation, General Bandholtz soon become disgusted by the large scale stealing (requisition, they called it) being carried out by the Romanians…

Enough was enough for General Bandholtz when he received a report on October 5, after dinner, that the Romanians were at the National Museum with a whole flock of trucks and proposed to take away many of the works of art. General Bandholtz, with two of his American colleagues, rushed to the museum, which they found under strong Romanian guard. The Romanians told them they were authorized by their High Command to take away all works of art that originate from Eastern Hungary, especially Transylvania, now under their control.

General Bandholtz, after a short conversation with the director of the Museum, decided to claim the keys to the storerooms and seal the door. A note was placed on the door, stating:

“To whom it may concern - As the Inter-Allied Mission in charge of all the objects in the Hungarian National Museum at Budapest, the key has been taken charge of by the President of the Day, General Bandholtz, the American representative.”

“As the Roumanians and all Europeans are fond of rubber-stamp display”, wrote Bandholtz in his diary, “and as we had nothing else, we used an American mail-censor stamp, with which we marked the seals.”

This is how General Bandholtz, armed only with a riding crop, prevented the Romanian army from removing the treasures of the National Museum and deserved his statue, erected in 1936 in front of the American embassy on Szabadsag ter ["Freedom Square"]. On the statue, you can still read what he said when later asked about the events of October 5:

“I simply carried out the instructions of my Government, as I understood them, as an officer and a gentleman of the United States Army.”

Indeed. Too bad they don’t make more like like him today.

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 13th, 2003 at 5:09 pm and is filed under aa-home. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.